This invention relates to an electrophotographic apparatus and, more particularly, to an electrophotographic apparatus with a manual paper feeder.
A prior art electrophotographic apparatus has a manually fed paper detector for detecting a paper sheet manually fed into a manual paper feeding section and a manually fed paper transporting roller. When the manually fed paper detector detects a paper sheet, the transporting roller is rotated to feed the paper sheet to aligning rollers disposed immediately before a photosensitive drum in the direction of travel. At this time, the aligning rollers are rotated to align the paper sheet and feed it in an aligned state in between the photoconductive drum and a transfer charger. In another manual paper feeder, a paper sheet is fed from a manual paper feeding section until it reaches the aligning rollers. When a paper detector disposed in the neighborhood of the aligning rollers detects the paper sheet, a state ready for a copying operation is set up. In this state, the copying operation is started by operating a copying start switch.
The latter manual paper feeder has a reduced number of components, so that it is simpler in construction and more inexpensive. However, sometimes a manually fed paper sheet fails to reach the aligning rollers. More specifically, a manually fed paper sheet having been detected by the manually fed paper detector may fail to reach the aligning rollers and thus be supplied to the transfer unit if it is pulled out from the manual paper feeder or falls therefrom. In this event, a control section determines the absence of paper in the transfer unit to be due to paper jamming so it interrupts the copying operation and also executes various safety locking operations. Once this is done, the operation of restoring the electrophotographic apparatus to the normal state requires very cumbersome operations of releasing various locking means. Frequent occurrence of such an event greatly reduces the reliability of the apparatus.